The Stephening Day 2: Sleepwalkers (1992)

 

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man, in possession of a blue trans-am, must be in want of a high school virgin to feed to his shapeshifting mother/lover.  

So goes Sleepwalkers, the film that dares to combine explicit incest and sexual assault with cute cats and campy one-liners.  I think it somehow works, not really in bringing together unlike things to create a brand new wonderful flavor, but rather just careening from scene to scene of omg wtf like is this for real.  

Madchen Amick performs an uncomfortably long dance solo with a floor sweeper in a movie theater lobby. Alice Krige stabs a cop with a corncob and then tells grain-impaled corpse to eat its vegetables. Wayne Knight (Newman from Seinfeld) Glenn Shadix plays an aggressive pedophile creative writing teacher. Ron Perlman is in it.  So is Mark Hamill for some reason. The shapeshifters can not only shapeshift but become invisible and also have a car that can turn invisible, and their only weakness is cats.

Cats.  I really just want to talk about the cats. 

According to Amazon, Sleepwalkers is "Terrifying, Gritty, Bleak."  To this I would also add: "Totes Adorbs."

Last week I had my face melted by the pyrotechnics of Firestarter. But that doesn't hold a candle (cat-dle?) to the feline training-technics of Sleepwalkers.  How do you train a herd of cats to act together?  Oscar-purrthy performances all around.  I know I know, but look at their tiny little faces! Their little paws!

The only ones not amused are the shapeshifters, who, isolated and driven out from society, are forced, like a lonely soul scrolling into the night, to confront angst's perennial foe: oodles of cuteness.